Dave and Nat’s wedding crash

• Posted: September 3, 2008
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• Author: Adam
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• Filed under: Divorce Stories
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• Tags: divorce stories, gut feeling, integrity, marriage

This divorce story was submitted by "Dave" a true to the heart journey of a relationship! Dave's submission included a note that he has never voiced this complete story before!

Well, I met N in a grocery store, and there was an instant “chemistry”… a magnetic attraction.  I was intensely attracted to her… physical chemistry, and her voice was extraordinary.  She was a bit freaked about it all.  She had identified herself as a lesbian for years, and was not inclined towards an attraction to men.

For the sake of clarity, let me say straight away here, that the issues in our marriage had little or nothing to do with N’s earlier preference for women.

There was straight on very very intense chemistry between us, and a lot of genuine affection beyond the “lust” we had for each other… we hit it off right away, and spent lots of time together.

We spent 5 months together, before she moved to Pennsylvania for a 6 month Yoga Instructors certification program.

It was a tough 6 months, and it almost wasn’t to be.  But we kept it together until she returned from PA, and we moved in together… A place out in the country.  Prior to moving in, I had gotten a gut feeling about the woman we were leasing the place from, and told Nat that I had “a really bad feeling about it”.  (WARNING:  Always… always… always… listen to your gut.  Did I say always?”)

Nat would hear none of it, and insisted we were moving in.  After heated discussion about it, I agreed to go ahead with it, but for the record stated I thought it was not in our best interest.

One night while we were running errands, she told me what she suspected…that she was pregnant.  We bought a test… yes, she was certainly pregnant.

The bottom line was, she wanted to keep the baby, and since I did love her, it seemed completely reasonable.  At the time, I had a bit of an “old fashioned” notion, that if there was a little one coming into the world, that it would be best to just get married and do the deal.  (Whatever the deal was?!)

So that’s what we did… despite my having a couple of very close friends advising against it.  (WARNING:  Can you know someone TOO long before marrying them?  NO!  I don’t think so…)

N’s was one horribly difficult pregnancy… she was very very sick most of the time.  She lost weight the entire 1st tri-mester.  I made sure to help in every way I could, but to top it off, the country place we moved into had a blossoming mildew problem.  Nothing seemed to knock it down, and it was not helping Nat’s health situation, and along with that, our landlord turned out to be the most bitter, distrustful paranoid person I had ever personally met.  Every single day, she made our lives a living hell.

We decided to move.  We broke our lease.  I told the property manager, we were leaving, and if ANYONE gave us any guff about it, I was going to sue everyone involved’ ass off, and enjoy every moment of it… and I had cause out the wazzoo.

The day we moved out, it was pouring down rain, and unbeknownst to us, the landlady from hell had snuck over, come into the garage, and put a lock on the outside of the garage access door to force us to move out in the pouring rain.  The door just would not open.  Obvious as it was to the cause of the stuck door, I managed to get it open, and it just blew the door frame apart.

The owner from hell ran over, upset that her plan didn’t work.  I told her to get out of the way, or I was calling the sheriff, and I WOULD have her arrested.  The look in my eyes suggested to her she had best just get out of the way, and let us be done with it.

As we drove away, Nat turned to me and said, “I will never disregard your gut instinct again.”

Unfortunately, I would…

We moved into a new place back in the city (Suburb of K.C., MO), got settled… mostly…  and then we headed to Pennsylvania again for the Christmas Holidays…

To make a long story short…  late at night, a few days before Christmas, Nat started to bleed.  We were freaked… we went to the hospital the next morning, and got horrible news.  The baby was dead.

It was 5 months along… so we had to induce in order to deliver the little fella, so Christmas eve Nat delivered our deceased baby… and we cried a river over it….

CRAZY MAKING

For anyone that doesn’t know, the hormones of a pregnant woman are one of the wonders of nature… and this is actually a good thing.  That said, the body takes a while to catch up to the fact that something has changed in a major way, and the emotional roller coaster it creates in the process is pretty intense.

Nat really felt like she was losing her mind, and she was really angry at me for the loss of the baby.  It wasn’t a particularly rational anger, but it was pretty intense none the less.

I woke up in the wee morning hours one night to Nat sobbing uncontrollably.  I asked what was wrong, and she told me “I think I’m losing my mind.”  Later that morning, I went to put something in the garage, and there was broken glass EVERYWHERE.  She had smashed a few big bins of glass recycling to smithereens.  That evening, she told me she had woken up seething with anger, seriously thought about killing me while I slept, and when she went into the kitchen to get a knife, saw some glass recycle and decided to break glass instead.

And so it went…

What I finally realized, is that the intensity of our circumstances was just the place of expression for what didn’t work between us.  Nat lived for confrontation, and I tended to be more steady, and she needed to get a rise out of me, or else she felt unsatisfied with our relationship.

This expressed itself on a pretty regular basis with her inappropriate behavior towards other men, the intent being to get a reaction out of me.  It took a while for me to really realize why she was doing this…  I just couldn’t imagine game playing at that level… it wasn’t a part of my lexicon of behavior.  I’m sure no saint… that’s for sure… that just isn’t my deal.

It was another gut feeling that finally led me to figure out what was going on.  After a couple of pretty bad scenes, I had pretty well made it clear I wasn’t playing this game any more.

This scenario ended up replaying itself with the neighbor across the street, a guy 10 years younger than Nat.  That was finally the last straw…

… I was done playing, and she thought we should separate.  I agreed, but had decided we were going to do more than separate… we were getting a divorce for sure.  I never brought it up, because she arrived at the same idea the next day.

I moved out, we divorced a few months later, and she ended up having a baby with the kid (darn near) across the street.  He finally left her when she was 5 months pregnant with number 2 kid, for a cute gal more her age.

It’s not a very exciting story… and I am quite some distance from the initial anger and duress of that time.  In a very real way, I felt like I had been spared a hellish existence by virtue of us breaking up… and as horrible as losing our baby was, raising a baby with Nat would have been like a special occasion version of misery and frustration.

Nat bounced around a bit, became a born again Christian (which, oddly, actually seemed to help her).

I saw her a couple of years ago, and she let me know I was going to hell, because “the bible says so”, based on my beliefs being divergent from hers.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge, so to speak, since then, and I have come to understand a great deal about my own shortcomings as a partner.  Knowing them before all this, the outcome would have likely remained the same.  But, looking at my own part, I do know myself better than I did.

A few things I (hope) I have learned from my experiences with and since Nat.

- I can always have done more, for my part.  It might not help… it might be completed wasted on the person or situation… but it will always help me live better with me… eventually.

- No matter what I think I’ve learned, I am perfectly capable of overruling my gut instincts,
if presented with a sufficiently attractive motivation to do so, even when those about me can clearly see I am making an unwise

- ALWAYS listen to your gut feeling

- Don’t fraternize with those who are crazy, or at least crazier than you.  They will make YOU
crazy!

- When someone tells you how “they used to be”… LISTEN UP!  If they haven’t also explained
in a compelling way why they have changed for the better, then they are likely STILL THE WAY THEY “USED TO BE”.

- Someone who will leave someone else to be with you, will almost ALWAYS leave you to do the same thing once again.

- Did I say always listen to your gut?

That’s what happened, from my perspective… and… interestingly, Nat, a few years later admitted she was really off the wall…

I have NO idea if there is anything remotely useful in this little snippet of a time in my life… a VERY DIFFICULT time, with a lot of loss in a brief span.

The other thing I have learned with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY… is that time, even though it feels it will NEVER get better… time does wear the sharp edges of painful experience off enough to make it possible, at a later time, to pick it up and examine things honestly, without cutting yourself up.

D.Y.

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